“But consumers pay for their purchases, here she wants to get something huge for free.”

The act of moving (or having one’s parent’s move) is the only price consumers want to pay for citizenship.

Sometimes even that’s too much, another forum I look into on Polish affairs has a steady stream of people with a Polish grandmother (or husband of a great grandfather’s sister) with Polish ancestry and they want to know how to get Polish (that is EU) citizenship for that.
In one case the person clearly didn’t qualify but did qualify to move to Poland and get automatic residency in which case they could get citizenship within a few years (the laws are complicated) and they were enraged about the necessity of actually spending some time in the country whose citizenship they felt entitled too….

It’s not just citizenship she wants. It’s complete acceptance on the terms she thinks she will define exclusively. It’s infantile in the literal sense. Infants don’t understand that there is a world outside of them filled with agency that’s not their own. Normal children begin to figure this out by the age of two (hence terrible twos) and the process is complete by the age of three. Most kids learn to understand that there is a will that contradicts their own by that age and make peace with it. Even my Klara, who is not even two yet, is starting to accept that sometimes she can’t even if she really wants to. And here is an adult woman who’s shrieking at the world like this is an entirely novel concept.

That’s why I partly would gloat if feministing went belly up (it’s been all tantrums almost all the time for a couple years now) but part of me would miss clicking over there for the sheer undignified freakishness of the place.

Also, her goal is to get American citizenship for herself and probably for her relatives too, not to be logical or learn anything. You telling her to go read is like telling to a representative of an oil lobby to go read about global warming. Would this reading help her to persuade more Americans to grant more citizenships to undocumented immigrants?

I don’t think it’s a lack of a liberal arts education that’s the problem in her case. It’s not like Feministing’s audience is comprised of people who don’t have a liberal arts education.

You have to ask yourself why hectoring listicles that focus on correct speech are so popular.

Notice there’s nothing about “calling Congress or your local representatives at all levels” about stuff like this. There also isn’t anything about actually welcoming immigrants. A+ allying on not saying the word “illegal” at the intra-leftist jamboree, do you actually welcome immigrants into your lives? Do you interact with immigrants in any meaningful way? Maybe all these correct speech directives are a defense against actually doing any of that.

A few seemingly unrelated observations:
1) Listicles focusing on correct speech are reminiscent of religion.
2) These listicles seem to be particularly popular on certain types of websites aimed at liberal women (e.g. Feministing).
3) In many Western societies, women have higher church attendance than men.

For all the pretenses of modernism and secularism among the people who write these sorts of listicles, I think they’re tapping into much older and deeper cultural currents. I think they’ve produced a secular religion, only without feasts in December and chocolate eggs in spring.

I think you are right. People want some sort of certainty in an uncertain world. It’s sad to observe because political correctness is a particularly unappealing God. I’d rather they just went to church (temple, mosque, whatever).

I used to believe that studying the humanities and social sciences was more threatening to religion than studying natural science, because the most powerful parts of religious texts are the social teachings, the lessons on people and community. I believed this because I was trying to make sense of the abundance of engineers among religious fundamentalists (both Christian and Muslim).

Now I think that studying humanities and social science can actually make people more religious, just in a different way. While there are plenty of students of humanities and social science who are uninterested in the modern church of social justice, there are plenty of others who crave its promises of redemption.